A movie grossing a billion dollars is no minor feat. This is an honor typically reserved for megahits from companies like Disney or from established IPs. This year saw its first billion-dollar movie in the sequel to the 2024 hit animated film, The Super Mario Bros Movie, titled The Super Mario GalaxyMovie. It grossed approximately $1 billion globally, making it the year’s highest-grossing film. However, there occasionally comes a crowd-pleaser that shatters all expectations. This year’s surprise hit was a movie that critics panned, but fans loved, and it has continued to rule at the box office.
This movie has grossed over $900 million thus far and has already made history as the highest-grossing music biopic of all time, dethroning Bohemian Rhapsody. It continues to pull decent numbers eight weeks into its theatrical run, with projections showing it will cross the billion-dollar mark sooner or later. Michael, the biopic of the legendary singer Michael Jackson, is the film in question that received negative critical reviews but became a success for Universal and Lionsgate. The movie recently arrived on PVOD, where it has replicated this success, moonwalking to number one on online stores like iTunes and Amazon. It is not expected that this PVOD release will affect its ability to cross the billion-dollar mark in the coming weeks, as Kino Films has recently brought it to Japan, and the opening numbers have been encouraging. It remains to be seen if the musical biopic will dethrone the animated film and become this year’s highest-grossing film.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua, Michael tells the story of one of the most influential singers of all time. The film traces his early days and his subsequent rise to superstardom. The film received negative reviews from critics and currently holds a 38% rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. However, fans of the “Thriller” hitmaker have given it a whooping 97%. Critics note that while star and Michael’s nephew Jaafar Jackson is great in the role, their consensus on the biopic says it plays out like a “‘greatest hits’ album that could’ve benefitted from including liner notes to give actual insight into the icon.” And maybe that’s the exact reason fans love the film that has them “moonwalking across the globe.” That said, suits love a movie like Michael, and if they have a shot at another billion dollars in a few years, a sequel is the logical extension.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
Parasite
Everything Everywhere
Oppenheimer
Birdman
No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
‘Michael’s Story Will Continue
The first film doesn’t cover many aspects of the singer’s controversial life, but those could be explored in the sequel in development. Lionsgate film chief Adam Fogelson revealed in a statement that there is “progress” being made regarding the sequel. “All the conversations that we’ve been having with all of the appropriate parties continue to go exceptionally well,” he said. If it is made, Michael Jackson would be one of the few people to have a biopic sequel.
Michael is available in theaters and for purchase online. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
